A Pedagogical Approach to Orienting Access in Classrooms

Meloncon writes for the Business and Professional Communications educator but most of her arguments apply equally to post-secondary educators across the board.  She is doing important theory-building work that builds on Sarah Ahmed’s work.

For Ahmed (2006a), “orientations are about starting points” (p. 545), and that is exactly what I needed, a place to start, a point to reconsider orientations toward access and inclusion in the classroom. In Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others, Ahmed (2006b) built a theoretical framework for nonnormative bodies, which is a conceptualization of bodies that includes bodies that are not normal.

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Thinking of orientation as a way to point to a new direction, I saw the opportunity to shift—to orient differently—the entire business and professional communication classroom….  a new orientation is necessary: one that points in directions where educational spaces entangled with student bodies and social and cultural factors can move beyond normalized to inclusive, where difference is acknowledged and accepted… It also highlights the potential for students to direct their bodies—disabled or nondisabled—and their experiences in new ways—such as their actual physical positions in the classroom, their ability to grapple with new material and diverse perspectives, and their responses to alternative pedagogical approaches.

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Orienting access encourages programs and instructors to shift “from an ideology of normalcy to an ideology of inclusion” where inclusion is infused into every aspect of curricular design and pedagogical practice (Oswal & Meloncon, 2017, p. 68)…Orienting access ensures an inclusive environment that allows all student bodies to orient toward, and interact with, other bodies, viewpoints, perspectives, and educational objects.

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Meloncon troubles the notion of a learner who is either able or disabled.

…ability and disability exist on a spectrum, and the clear-cut binaries of able-bodied and disabled stand on fragile scientific ground.

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She offers educators practical strategies to shift their own orientation toward accessibility. Starting with how they write and share their course syllabus.

• offer syllabus in multiple accessible formats, employing clear language and descriptive headings
• discuss the accessibility statement, what does accessibility mean in in learning and how will it be nurtured in their course?

She discusses transformation via participation, learner feedback, and participatory assessment design. She highlights the significance of centering learner agency and choice, while also noting that some common strategies intended to support learner agency can materialize in ways that are not functionally accessible, e.g. group work.

Many who teach in this field understand the connection to transformation through a culture of participation as a result of our long-standing connections to user experience, usability, and participatory design….As experienced instructors know, student learning outcomes can be met in a variety of ways. Providing multiple assignment options allows students to choose the one that works best for them and mitigates the need for students to disclose and immediately become the other… From a participatory design perspective, students can be asked to help create the assignments. While this works better later in the term when students have foundational knowledge of course concepts, it offers students and instructors a different way of orienting to classroom assignments…

…Consider for a moment the field’s use of group work. For students with anxiety disorders or attention problems, group work can be traumatic, and for students with certain types of aural disabilities, the noise of group work can be unsettling and disturbing. Thus, alternative modes, such as using online collaborative spaces, should be considered.

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key components of accessible course design…providing the same types of interactions and experiences for all students regardless of disability, ensuring levels of independence (e.g., students with disabilities should not—within reason—be dependent on the instructor to intercede in all class activities), and providing access to course information.

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She also highlights the importance of educators being thoughtful about their technology choices, pointing out common accessibilty issues with learning management systems and discussion boards.

For example, for students with a variety of disabilities, discussion boards in learning management systems are difficult to access. Business and professional communication instructors should then consider how to facilitate the pedagogical outcomes of the discussion board in alternative ways, such as activities in class (or online) that demonstrate students have done the reading.

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She offers educators research questions as praxis provocations.

What would an inclusive flipped classroom look like? How can we take other student-centered pedagogies and shift their orientations to ensure that all students have access to the same learning opportunities? What exemplary business and professional communication practices can we employ in our courses for our students, which would later help them orient access in their workplaces and lives?

She also uses learner feedback prompts as praxis provocations.

Did you find certain assignment options useful for your learning? Were the assessment instruments clear? What did you find useful about the exercise of helping create assignments? Did you feel your voices and concerns were heard?

…

To ensure an open and safe space, this type of discussion can be facilitated by the business and professional communication program administrator or another faculty. Things to consider for this type of participator feedback would be the effectiveness of class interactions facilitated by the instructor, questions of technology and their ease of access, types of in-class exercises, comments on the syllabus, suggestions about alternative assignments, and ways to facilitate better student-to-student discussions. The ultimate goal is to obtain feedback from students on the inclusive nature of the classroom. Providing students a consistent voice is a practical implementation of orienting access because it empowers students to provide information that directly affects their learning.

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Meloncon is careful to point out that making changes in learning spaces is only part of the work necessary for orienting access in post-secondary. (I’ll note here that changes in the classroom are where UDL rhetoric starts and stops.) She ties the work to critical engagement with disability both in the classroom and in the policies and practices of institution as a whole.

The classroom and program levels provide documented examples of Ahmed’s (2012) important point that paying attention to something shows that it is valued. Orientation allows attention and value to come to the fore, provides the practical steps necessary to enact institutional policies all the way down to the classroom level, and brings diversity and inclusion to the attention of faculty and students.

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Meloncon also speaks to the importance of modeling respect for accessibility in the classroom so that it extends out into learners professional (and I’ll add social) lives.

We also need to model these behaviors for students to take with them into their future workplaces. For business and professional communication classrooms and programs, orienting access becomes an ethical infrastructure that ensures diversity within the classroom.

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